I've seen nothing about crafting. I was hoping maybe an Admin could pop over to this thread, give us something to chew on? On SoI, crafts were based around the goods you were working with(woodworking, farming, metalworking, masonry, etc.), while on Atonement it was the end product that crafts/skills were based around(gunsmithing, weaponcrafting, armorcrafting). Which 'style' is SoI looking at for this go?

Also, I've always loved Atonement/Parallel's handicrafting(clothesmaking)/artistry system, where the skill of the crafter is directly referenced in the items made/edited. I was wondering if perhaps that system could be ported over to the weapons and armor/other crafts, as a way to differentiate a mastercrafted sword from a lousy one(at least cosmetically). It's alwaaaaays been something I've hoped for, so I thought I'd give it a selfish little bump here.

And then there's the question of Dwarves, Elves, and Men: they all craft differently. Are we going to have different craftsuites available to the different races, so you can(as Elves and Men and Wizards and all the rest could) differentiate easily between the goods each race makes?

We just finished discussing the merits of the old SOI resource-based skill system versus the Atonement product-based skill system.

We're getting the list of skills/craftsets blessed and then it will be posted. Hopefully by next week.

Dwarven/Elven crafting is an excellent topic to discuss... not sure if they're putting it in-scope for Alpha (I suspect we shouldn't). I'm also excited about it, and like the idea of considering it in Open. To that end, I'd be happy of someone went to the Lore forum and started conversations about the Tolkien-canon theories of dwarven and elven manufacture that I'd be able to use to develop craftsets in the future.

I have a few insignificant questions for mostly curiosity if that's alright!

What will the practical application be for crafts like masonry, bookbinding, or sculpting? Will people be able to earn a living from these, for example, or are they purely cosmetic?

What are the practical differences between the old literacy and education? Renaming might be a decent idea, as the current name seems a little vague, since education doesn't necessarily just pertain to writing or literacy - nothing major though.

Last question for now: what will become of psionics, if they were even kept from the original SoI engine? What's the staff's take on still being able to roll psionics (or some similar element of them) at a rare change?

It looks like baking is going to be a separate skill. Wouldn't it be better to just include it under cooking as its own craftset?

Something never sat well with me about having the dual-wield skill govern the use of shields. It kind of turns dual-wield into both a defensive and offensive stance.

There's a ton of metalworking stuff considering the extreme scarcity of metal. Are these all for alpha or do you plan to delay some of them into later installments?

What will haggle do here?

Eavesdrop was complete garbage on ARPI and frankly not worth a skill slot. How about moving it to given skills?

What use will steal and picklock be? Is this an element of roleplay that has a place in Laketown? Should there be crooks amongst humans? Do you plan to make the usage these skills actually viable and facilitated, unlike many previous spheres/games?

One overall answer across the questions below - A lot went into which skills were collapsed down and which ones were made extant, and how many picks it would take for certain roles. As a general guideline, core activities of the game design have distinct skills to support them. Periphery roles are more condensed and require less picks.

Our core activities are Fighting, Living (eating, drinking, singing, and remembering), Crafting, and Gathering from the wilderness.

You see this emphasis in the distinction between Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging - the three key areas of resource gathering for our game. You see it in Cooking, Baking, and Brewing - three key areas of cooking and living enjoyable life in town. More differentiation supports more players working it and allows more distinction between them as they do so.

On the other side you see a lot condensed. Each of the "Combined Skills" is an example. We support these periphery roles, but they will have less going on in them so are condensed to allow it to cover more breadth. Each of these combines resource gathering and crafting in a single skill, and in some cases combines multiple skill areas into one set as well.

Drew7uk wrote:What will the practical application be for crafts like masonry, bookbinding, or sculpting? Will people be able to earn a living from these, for example, or are they purely cosmetic?

There are a lot of creative ways to earn a living, and a big gap between "earn a living" and "purely cosmetic."

Stone will be an import good. Most construction on the lake or in the wood camp will be wood, but there will be some support for things that require masonry... that also depends on how much Open will rely on you building new permanent features (chimneys, homes, furnaces, etc.) Sculpting is the most exciting part, in my mind. The new Artistry code allows custom art objects (i.e. sculptures) with unique short and full descriptions to be completely player created. I see this form of permanent memoriam being important to the game's in-character legacy and culture.

Book-binding is not a "make a living" but more to make scholars a bit more self-sufficient. In a place rich with wood pulp and leather, they should be able to make books and paper. What they do with them is then player-driven - creation of in-game written material has its own inherent value, as it always did.

Drew7uk wrote:What are the practical differences between the old literacy and education? Renaming might be a decent idea, as the current name seems a little vague, since education doesn't necessarily just pertain to writing or literacy - nothing major though.

The differences are mostly noted in the announcement:

It includes the ability to read and write from the old Literacy code.

It benefits educated skills by reducing the chance of critical failures (applies mostly to Medicine).

It will be used in crafting as a second skill check for things that require scholarship to do - for example, all the things in the old Apothecary skill set using alembics and science, which are now embedded with their core resource skills. (Alchemy under stonecraft, perfumery under gardening, etc)

Drew7uk wrote:Last question for now: what will become of psionics, if they were even kept from the original SoI engine? What's the staff's take on still being able to roll psionics (or some similar element of them) at a rare change?

We didn't even consider them. If there is a special use for them it will be handled by Elder Staff.

The ARPI code revision bundles them under one skill, which is not randomly rolled, and which is not available as a skill pick.

Throttle wrote:It looks like baking is going to be a separate skill. Wouldn't it be better to just include it under cooking as its own craftset?

Under the general note above. There is greater differentiation in core areas of the game. One of those is the creation of the steady stream of food-based consumables that the playerbase needs - butchering, cooking, baking, and brewing.

Throttle wrote:Something never sat well with me about having the dual-wield skill govern the use of shields. It kind of turns dual-wield into both a defensive and offensive stance.

It is what it is, really. I don't have an issue as both sole-wield and dual-wield have their own unique properties and moves which add to the combat experience.

Does someone have documentation from ARPI or PRPI on the special moves and commands these two skills enable? We need to share that information, and I don't remember it all.

Throttle wrote:There's a ton of metalworking stuff considering the extreme scarcity of metal. Are these all for alpha or do you plan to delay some of them into later installments?

There are lots of things that need to be done with metal; how much metal there is to do it with is a separate concern. Scarcity doesn't matter if you don't have crafts that need it.

Also, we combined together several skills into this one under the condensing principal above - armorcraft, weaponcraft, gemcraft, blacksmithing, and jewelery/whitesmithing. So, you do get a decent breadth as well.

Throttle wrote:What will haggle do here?

Same thing it always did - alter prices at NPC shops so you can buy low and sell high.

It will also feature in the bulk trading system if we can write it to do so.

Throttle wrote:Eavesdrop was complete garbage on ARPI and frankly not worth a skill slot. How about moving it to given skills?

It never occurred to me that someone would spend a skill pick on it. It is a given skill, and always has been. People who spend a lot of time overhearing table conversations at the tavern grow it naturally.

Throttle wrote:What use will steal and picklock be? Is this an element of roleplay that has a place in Laketown? Should there be crooks amongst humans? Do you plan to make the usage these skills actually viable and facilitated, unlike many previous spheres/games?

The only thing announced here is that the skills still exist.

What is done with those skills is a matter for story and plotline, and how much will be supported or not supported in Open is something that the Elder Staff will decide as we look past Alpha.

What are the practical differences between the old literacy and education? Renaming might be a decent idea, as the current name seems a little vague, since education doesn't necessarily just pertain to writing or literacy - nothing major though.

As there is no free public education system, those who attended schooling are seen to have gotten at minimum a basic education in literacy and basic scientific instruction. As noted, literacy doesn't have the same heavy-handed importance in the North as elsewhere, so - it's a wider scope of being "higher educated."

You only got eavesdrop on Atonement if you specifically picked it, and it took an absurdly long time to increase. Even if you had high intelligence, you might never see it appear if you didn't pick it, even if you had branched all sorts of other skills.

Dual-wield is, in general, much more useful than sole-wield. The only really advantage that sole-wield provides is access to the ward command. Otherwise, dual-wield allows for potentially better damage output, and for solid defense, with a shield.

Personally, I'd return to having dual-wield and shield-use be separate skills, and make dual-wield both an RPP-restricted choice, to reflect the fact that it's a downright odd way to fight, especially in this setting, and also make the skill caps on it much lower than for other fighting styles, to reflect that handling a pair of swords simultaneously should be difficult. That would leave a real choice between shield-use and sole-wield, or getting both, rather than dual-wield being the first choice for most, and paired weapons being commonplace, which just doesn't fit the setting very well.

I think that metalcraft should be broken up. Create a new skill, toolmaking, that probably covers all the stuff in blacksmith. Metalcraft existed on old SoI, I think, but it wasn't very good, because tools were easy to get and never wore out, and the crafts were never all made for it. Then have separate skills for weaponsmiths, armourers, and jewellers. Why? Because otherwise it's the single most valuable skill I can see, done like that, since a person with that metalcraft skill would be constantly employed, due to the range of items produced. With a high enough skill level, itself easily obtained due to the huge range of crafts available, they would probably become incredibly wealthy, too. Alternatively, put the jeweller crafts and blacksmithing in with regular metalcraft, but ensure a crossover between jewellery and stoneworking. I really do think that weaponsmithing and armourmaking should require specific skills of their own, however.

The special attacks of the two fighting styles are bash and ward. I don't know any numbers, but bash (dual-wield) required a shield and did damage while ward (sole-wield) would cause all enemies except the one you were hitting to disengage and be unable to rejoin the fight for a few rounds. It puts the user off balance, though, so using ward while several things are hitting you can be suicide if you fail. Bash failure has a chance to make you fall down, which is of course worse, but it's not something you would use while "tanking."

There is feint, too, which you can use when you have a secondary weapon equipped. It causes an automatic miss for one weapon and a marginally increased chance to hit for the other, I think. It's not particularly useful, except in certain edge cases.

Throttle wrote:Oh yeah, I forgot feint. It wasn't worth using, the loss of balance was a bigger penalty than the skill's benefit.

It was rarely useful, like when opponents were downed. It's hard to balance skills and their special abilities, because feint was incredibly powerful only in niche situations. Same with sole wield/ward, whereas shield-use's ability(bash) was mostly too risky for combat until adroit/master or higher.

The main problem with them is that being off-balance is so much of a risk and disadvantage that they're barely worth using even when you don't fail the skill check. Only ward has an effect that's significant enough to potentially be a big deal since it can save your ass from a pack of animals. By and large, these moves had very little influence on combat, certainly nowhere near the same impact as your choice between sole- and dual-wield has on how your character performs in standard combat.

The skill list brings up something that is the brick wall I've hit on SoI and everyt other code-heavy game I've played. It is necessary to have skills start at a basic level and advance, not only for character "growth" and to discourage munchkins, but also because some people really get off on advancing their character's coded skills. I don't get off on advancement, but I accept that it's important.

However, it has always seemed to me that having all skills start at basic levels makes it almost impossible to create a character with any sort of life experience. Since I really like to make characters who are both over the age of thirty and competent enough at some sort of vocational skill that you can believe that they've been able to support themselves, coded beginning stats can be a real pain.

From my memory, you can set a few skills higher during chargen on SoI. However, I also clearly remember my one character who was approved with a background saying he was a skilled X and who had considerable chargen points invested in X, but who, once in game, couldn't do X to save his life. As a result, there went a whole lot of X roleplay that I was looking forward to having with the character, and in came a lot of handwaving to explain why X wasn't happening.

Will it be possible to have a character who is competent at one thing out of the gate even if everything else is only fair? This may have already been addressed in later games, but since I've been out of the loop for quite a while I don't know.

Burke - that is a good point to discuss. How about this as an idea for brainstorming? What if character age lowered attributes and added skill points? Being an old person IRL, I would also find it realistic.

Octavius wrote:Burke - that is a good point to discuss. How about this as an idea for brainstorming? What if character age lowered attributes and added skill points? Being an old person IRL, I would also find it realistic.

Even on systems that don't do this automatically, if I have control of attributes as well as skills I lower things like constitution, dexterity, or perception to simulate a character who is arthritic or losing his or her hearing. That can be frustrating when you have to spend all or a stock number of attribute points out of a pool, though, and end up dumping extra points into something silly as a result just to balance the books. Increasing wisdom certainly makes sense, but if you hit a cap there what do you do? Having a trade-off between attribute/stat points and skill points that varies by character age seems like a good way to handle this, and in fact I'm sure I've played a a game or two that have such a mechanic.

On a game where total stats/attributes are set permanently but you can learn/increase any skill simply by doing...this system has some rather obvious downsides player-side. Who would be anything above 18 to start with?

tehkory wrote:On a game where total stats/attributes are set permanently but you can learn/increase any skill simply by doing...this system has some rather obvious downsides player-side. Who would be anything above 18 to start with?

I'm not sure that I follow your question, tehkory, probably because I'm no longer familiar with SoI (or any sort of RPI) chargen and because I've paid very little attention to RPG mechanics over the years. Are you saying that there would be player downsides to reducing attribute points while raising skills points when that player choses to create an older character? Could you be a bit clearer about what those downsides would be?

I'm thinking that "older" means at least older than 40, by the way. Anyone who suggests that 30 is old deserves bludgeoning since I'm less than a decade away from being twice that.

I think tehkory is referring to the number of boosts which people might get for picking a younger PC would result in people simply picking 18 year old characters. But I think that's easily solved with a decent balance between other skill or stat reduction if you do pick a younger character with higher starting skills.

If anything, it's more RPP roles or races - there are boosts to some skills and stats, but reductions in other areas. I see older/younger PCs as a little bit like that as well.

In any case, I'm fairly certain you can grant skills based on a stat number - I don't recall specifically how the command works, and whether it's present in this codebase. If so, it'd be a case of tweaking stats, and having skills added manually as you would with a role.

Outside of that, you could always just go through a series of steps when applying which outline your professions - questions which determine what you're good at, and what you'll be weaker at. The code will set these for you as accurately as possible without giving you any numbers, and bumping/reducing skills you take accordingly.

Most of the skill list looks pretty good. I'd probly like it a little more if the dual-wield skill was split, so to seperate shield use and two-weapon fighting into their own skills.

Im very much in favour of the idea of having military characters standing out from non military when it comes to fighting with such above skills, instead of having master merchants picking weapon skills and becoming ultimate vending machines/gods of war smacking down trained soldiers.

Any backstab or poisoning skills still about? I never think of backstab as a stab to the back, but more skill in knowing to go for the sweet spots.

Evilone wrote:Most of the skill list looks pretty good. I'd probly like it a little more if the dual-wield skill was split, so to seperate shield use and two-weapon fighting into their own skills.

Im very much in favour of the idea of having military characters standing out from non military when it comes to fighting with such above skills, instead of having master merchants picking weapon skills and becoming ultimate vending machines/gods of war smacking down trained soldiers.

Any backstab or poisoning skills still about? I never think of backstab as a stab to the back, but more skill in knowing to go for the sweet spots.

I don't agree about the military having skills that separate them from non-military types. They already have the advantage of better arms and armor. When the survival of a population depends on their skills at arms, fighting skills are taught throughout the population from the moment they can grasp a weapon specially at a small settlement in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by creatures who seek to kill them. In this situation, you would see children running and playing with makeshift wooden weapons and shields in the streets, imitating the adults specially the military. Besides, not all bloodthirsty, violent and aggressive people join the military. Their attitudes aren't good for a group which demands obedience and order. A person like that may disdain the military, and, instead, concentrate his fury and rage in chopping down trees.

Emilio wrote:A person like that may disdain the military, and, instead, concentrate his fury and rage in chopping down trees.

...and that person is extremely skilled in Bludgeon.

Sole-wield and Dual-wield represent that you have experience facing a skilled foe, as opposed to hunting deer, or chopping a tree. I expect this experience comes from roles that denote it, or from players gaining this experience in game.

If it is offered as a skill pick then it represents that level of higher specialization for someone focusing in this way. Much as anyone can take first-aid but someone really focusing will devote two picks to get first-aid and medicine.

tehkory wrote:On a game where total stats/attributes are set permanently but you can learn/increase any skill simply by doing...this system has some rather obvious downsides player-side. Who would be anything above 18 to start with?

I'm not sure that I follow your question, tehkory, probably because I'm no longer familiar with SoI (or any sort of RPI) chargen and because I've paid very little attention to RPG mechanics over the years. Are you saying that there would be player downsides to reducing attribute points while raising skills points when that player choses to create an older character? Could you be a bit clearer about what those downsides would be?

Attributes are important, particularly moreso for the combatant over the crafter. That said, I'd say there are reasons that we send our 18-25 year olds into combat as infantrymen.

I think the idea is appealing for precisely the roles that Burke discusses above. If someone wants to play an older, wiser character who is focused on a skill rather than raw battle prowess, cool. A older military leader with a high long-blade and dual-wield can still hold their own even if they have less constitution, agility, and/or strength.

From a straight optimization model, yes, it is best to start young with higher attributes and then learn skills in game because you can get more total points. The proposal that raised this question was for someone who's character ideal didn't work with that model.

Emilio wrote:A person like that may disdain the military, and, instead, concentrate his fury and rage in chopping down trees.

...and that person is extremely skilled in Bludgeon.

Sole-wield and Dual-wield represent that you have experience facing a skilled foe, as opposed to hunting deer, or chopping a tree. I expect this experience comes from roles that denote it, or from players gaining this experience in game.

If it is offered as a skill pick then it represents that level of higher specialization for someone focusing in this way. Much as anyone can take first-aid but someone really focusing will devote two picks to get first-aid and medicine.

Yes, that's right, but, this person may learn solo-wield and dual-wield as he spent years fighting orcs in the woods. I don't think these skills should be limited to military character-types. They may be the best, but, aren't the only ones who used them. In my opinion, everyone should have these skills and then let their activities be the factor if these skills should progress or get stuck.